#802 -- Precautionary Mister Rogers, Part 1*, October 14, 2004
Can the precautionary principle be applied at the level of
municipalities or neighborhoods? Of course it can. It's already
happening.
The precautionary principle is also known as the "foresight
principle," or the "principle of fore-caring." The principle says we
should think carefully about what we are doing, all of us, with the
aim of anticipating and avoiding trouble. We should pay attention and
take responsibility for the consequences of our actions. When we
discover evidence that trouble is upon us (or about to come upon us),
we have a duty to take smart action to prevent harm: we should shift
the burden of proof onto the source of the problem to provide full
information about the available alternatives, and to explain how he
or she guarantees to do much better. The precautionary principle also
suggests that people who are affected by a situation or decision
(especially workers and community members) should be consulted and
informed about it, and should be given a real opportunity to be heard.
In this series, we are presenting ideas about how to use the
precautionary principle at the local level. A few of these ideas are
fully-baked, and a few are still half-baked. We welcome your thoughts
on these (or other) ways that the "foresight principle," the
"principle of fore-caring" can be applied locally in communities.
1. Precautionary (Least-Harm) Purchasing
Your local government can make a policy to purchase the least harmful
products and services. Obviously, this requires someone to define
harm. Harm can be narrowly defined as "involving toxic materials or
materials that damage the natural environment and/or human health."
(Or, as we'll see later on, harm could be more broadly defined.)
Government agencies purchase and use large quantities of toxic
materials in public buildings and facilities (cleansers, paints,
waxes, lubricants, pesticides, fungicides, etc.); in the operation of
ports and harbors; in transportation systems (streets, highways,
airports, trains, buses, boats, fleets of automobiles, vans and
trucks, etc.); in hospitals and other medical facilities; in
providing utility services such as water, street cleaning, waste
removal, snow removal, stormwater management, sewage treatment, and
public safety; in the maintenance of parks and public lands, and in
other ways.
San Francisco: Having adopted the precautionary principle to guide
all municipal policies, the city and county of San Francisco are now
working out the details of a revised environmentally preferable
purchasing policy.[1]
Portland, Oregon: Just last month, Portland and surrounding Multnomah
County created a work group of government officials and citizens to
spend the next year developing policies to minimize government's use
of toxic materials based on a precautionary approach.[2]
Seattle, Washington and surrounding King County have both adopted
environmentally preferable purchasing policies.[3]
As time goes on, municipalities will gain experience evaluating
least-toxic products and may learn to share information so each city
does not have to re-invent this wheel. The City of San Francisco has
expressed interest in creating such an information-sharing network,
as it evaluates the environmental impacts of products that the city
purchases. [To learn more about sharing such information, contact
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
These least-harmful purchasing policies promote innovation and
economic development because they invite "green" entrepreneurs to
demonstrate their wares. Thus they level the playing field for small
entrepreneurs, who sometimes have a hard time competing for "mind
space" at City Hall against the likes of 3M, Dow and DuPont.
Consistent with the precautionary principle, least-harm purchasing
policies shift the burden of proof onto the manufacturers (or
suppliers) of products and the providers of services, requiring them
to reveal the chemicals and processes involved in their products.
This gives city officials (and therefore the public) a new kind of
"right to know" about the environmental consequences of purchased
goods and services. Here the European catch-phrase for precautionary
chemicals policy can be used locally: No data, no market.
Harm Defined More Broadly
But "harm" can also be defined more broadly, beyond toxic effects on
the natural environment and human health. "Least harm" can be taken
to include least harm to the local economy, and least harm to the
relationships of respect, trust, caring and reciprocity that are the
glue holding communities together.
Here we can imagine the precautionary principle beginning to be
applied to social relations, not merely physical or biological or
chemical relations.
As background for the rest of this "Precautionary Mister Rogers"
series, here are 17 "rules" that Wendell Berry published a few years
ago in his essay, "Conserving Communities."[4] Berry was writing
mainly about rural communities -- and not specifically about the
precautionary principle -- but his 17 rules could provide
precautionary guidance to urban neighborhoods and even whole cities
seeking to avoid modern economic and social harms:
1. Always ask of any proposed change or innovation: What will this do
to our community? How will this affect our common wealth?
2. Always include local nature -- the land, the water, the air, the
native creatures -- within the membership of the community.
3. Always ask how local needs might be supplied from local sources,
including the mutual help of neighbors.
4. Always supply local needs first (and only then think of exporting
their products, first to nearby cities, and then to others.)
5. Understand the unsoundness of the industrial doctrine of "labor
saving" if that implies poor work, unemployment, or any kind of
pollution or contamination.
6. Develop properly scaled value-adding industries for local products
to ensure that the community does not become merely a colony of the
national or global economy.
7. Develop small-scale industries and businesses to support the local
farm and/or forest economy.
8. Strive to produce as much of the community's own energy as possible.
9. Strive to increase earnings (in whatever form) within the
community and decrease expenditures outside the community.
10. Make sure that money paid into the local economy circulates
within the community for as long as possible before it is paid out.
11. Make the community able to invest in itself by maintaining its
properties, keeping itself clean (without dirtying some other place),
caring for its old people, teaching its children.
12. See that the old and the young take care of one another. The
young must learn from the old, not necessarily and not always in
school. There must be no institutionalized "child care" and "homes
for the aged." The community knows and remembers itself by the
association of old and young.
13. Account for costs now conventionally hidden or "externalized."
Whenever possible, these costs must be debited against monetary
income.
14. Look into the possible uses of local currency, community-funded
loan programs, systems of barter, and the like.
15. Always be aware of the economic value of neighborly acts. In our
time the costs of living are greatly increased by the loss of
neighborhood, leaving people to face their calamities alone.
16. A rural community should always be acquainted with, and complexly
connected with, community-minded people in nearby towns and cities.
17. A sustainable rural economy will be dependent on urban consumers
loyal to local products. Therefore, we are talking about an economy
that will always be more cooperative than competitive.
Sometimes precautionary purchasing policies can embrace both kinds of
harm -- reducing toxic exposures while boosting the local economy.
Here's an example, provided by one of our readers, Ed Soph, of
Denton, Texas (population 90,000):
"Our environmental organization, Citizens for Healthy Growth, has
been guided by the [precautionary] principle since the group was
formed in late 1997 to stop a copper wire manufacturer, United Copper
Industries, from obtaining an air permit that would have allowed lead
emissions.
"The principle helped again in 2001 when a resident discovered that
2,4-D, simazine, Dicamba, and MCPP were being sprayed in the city
parks. The adoption of an Integrated Pest Management program was
urged, the question being, given the "suspected" dangers of these
chemicals, should the city regard those suspicions as a reassurance
of the chemicals' safety or as a warning of their potential dangers?
Should the city act out of ignorance or out of common sense and
precaution?
"A focus group of park users was formed and a pilot IPM [integrated
pest management] program was begun in a select number of parks.
System-wide, however, all use of 2,4-D, simazine, Dicamba, and MCPP
has been suspended....
"As well as keeping our parks safe, the IPM brought an unexpected
economic benefit to the community. Of great concern was the cost of
the corn gluten meal that is used as a turf builder and weed
deterrent. The city had to order it from a producer in the mid west
and, with shipping, the cost was high. Fortunately, it was discovered
that a local company that produced the gluten as a by-product of its
milling operation could supply the material at a considerable savings.
"The Parks Dept. gets the corn gluten meal from a local producer.
Now, the precautionary principle guides the latest project. After two
years of prodding, the city has finally admitted that the Industrial
Performance Standards that protect our air from toxic chemical
pollution are "antiquated" and useless. Benzene, toluene, and xylene
cannot be discharged into our wastewater system but they are allowed
to poison our air. A campaign is underway to enact air ordinances
that protect the future air quality of our community. With
persistence, the common sense of the precautionary principle will
again succeed."[5]
The precautionary principle is forward-thinking and visionary; it
urges smart action. Its aim is deliberate, careful, wise choices,
leading toward long-term prosperity and well-being.
Wendell Berry warns us against the alternative:
"We are now pretty obviously facing the possibility of a world that
the supranational corporations, and the governments and educational
systems that serve them, will control entirely for their own
enrichment -- and, incidentally and inescapably, for the
impoverishment of all the rest of us. This will be a world in which
the cultures that preserve nature and rural life will simply be
disallowed. It will be, as our experience already suggests, a
postagricultural world. But as we now begin to see, you cannot have a
postagricultural world that is not also postdemocratic,
postreligious, postnatural -- in other words, it will be posthuman,
contrary to the best that we have meant by 'humanity.'"[4]
[To be continued.]
==========
* This series is a collaborative effort of Peter Montague and Maria
B. Pellerano of Environmental Research Foundation, and Carolyn
Raffensperger and Nancy J. Myers of the Science and Environmental
Health Network (www.sehn.org). Any errors or lapses in the published
version are Montague's alone.
[1] http://temp.sfgov.org/sfenvironment/aboutus/toxics/epp/ and see
http://www.greenaction.org/cancer/sfdraftlegislation.shtml
[2] The Portland resolution is available on the web at
http://www.oregon-health.org/assets/Precaution/Toxics%20Resolut
ion%20MultCo%202004.pdf and the supporting report is available at
http://www.oregon-health.org/assets/Precaution/SDC%20Toxics%20R
eport%202004.pdf.
[3] http://www.metrokc.gov/procure/green/EPPtools.htm and
http://www.cityofseattle.net/environment/purchasing.htm
[4] From: Wendell Berry, "Conserving Communities," published in his
book, Another Turn of the Crank (New York: Counterpoint Press, 1996);
ISBN 1887178287. The whole, wonderful essay is available at
http://www.rachel.org/library/getfile.cfm?ID=480
[5] Ed Soph, president, Citizens for Healthy Growth, Denton, Texas;
phone (940) 383-4693; fax (940) 565-2002; email:
[EMAIL PROTECTED]; web: http://www.citizens4healthygrowth.org
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